Child Rights

Two lawsuits accusing the world’s largest social media companies of harming children begin this week, marking the first legal efforts to hold companies like Meta responsible for the effects their products have on young users.

Opening arguments began today in a case brought by New Mexico’s attorney general’s office, which alleges that Meta failed to protect children from sexually explicit material. A separate case in Los Angeles, which accuses Meta and the Google-owned YouTube of deliberately designing their platforms to be addictive for children, is set to begin later this week.

TikTok and Snap were also named in the original California lawsuit but later settled under undisclosed terms.

The New Mexico and California lawsuits are the first of a wave of 40 lawsuits filed by state attorneys general around the US against Meta, specifically, that allege that the social media giant is harming the mental health of young Americans.

New Mexico case

In the opening argument in the New Mexico case, which was first filed in 2023, prosecutors told jurors on Monday that Meta – Facebook and Instagram’s parent company – had failed to disclose its platforms’ harmful effects on kids.

“The theme throughout this trial is going to be that Meta put profits over safety,” said lawyer Donald Migliori, who is representing the state of New Mexico against Meta.

“Meta clearly knew that youth safety was not its corporate priority… that youth safety was less important than growth and engagement.”

Prosecutors say they will provide evidence and testimony that Meta’s algorithms and account features not only enticed young people and made them addicted to social media, but also fostered a “breeding ground” for predators who target children for sexual exploitation.

Late last month, in the process of discovery, the New Mexico attorney general’s office said the company did not put in safeguards to protect children from accessing sexualised chatbots on Facebook and Instagram.

In emails obtained by the court, some of Meta’s safety staff had expressed objections that the company was building chatbots geared for companionship, including sexual and romantic interactions with users, according to the Reuters news agency.

The artificial intelligence chatbots were released in early 2024. The documents cited in the state’s filing do not include messages or memos authored by Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg. In October 2025, Meta added parental controls to the chatbots.

California case

The California case is more wide-reaching and alleges that Meta and YouTube, which is a unit of Alphabet-owned Google, used deliberate design choices that sought to make their platforms more addictive to children to boost profits.

The case centres around a 19-year-old identified only by the initials KGM. The case could determine how thousands of other, similar lawsuits against social media companies will play out.

KGM claims that her use of social media from an early age made her addicted to the technology and exacerbated her depression and suicidal thoughts.

“Borrowing heavily from the behavioral and neurobiological techniques used by slot machines and exploited by the cigarette industry, Defendants deliberately embedded in their products an array of design features aimed at maximizing youth engagement to drive advertising revenue,” the lawsuit says.

Executives, including Zuckerberg, are expected to testify at the trial, which will last six to eight weeks. It is unclear if they will attend the New Mexico case.

The tech companies dispute the claims that their products deliberately harm children, citing a bevvy of safeguards they have added over the years and arguing that they are not liable for content posted on their sites by third parties.

“Recently, a number of lawsuits have attempted to place the blame for teen mental health struggles squarely on social media companies,” Meta said in a recent blog post. “But this oversimplifies a serious issue. Clinicians and researchers find that mental health is a deeply complex and multifaceted issue, and trends regarding teens’ well-being aren’t clear-cut or universal.

Narrowing the challenges faced by teens to a single factor ignores the scientific research and the many stressors impacting young people today, like academic pressure, school safety, socio-economic challenges and substance abuse.”

A Meta spokesperson said in a recent statement that the company strongly disagrees with the allegations outlined in the lawsuit and that it is “confident the evidence will show our longstanding commitment to supporting young people”.

Jose Castaneda, a Google spokesperson, said the allegations against YouTube are “simply not true”.

“Providing young people with a safer, healthier experience has always been core to our work,” he said in a statement.

High stakes

The outcome of the cases could shape the future of social media.

“In my mind, an existential question for social media services is whether they’re liable for harm suffered by users from using the services. If so, the damages could be more money than the defendants have, Eric Goldman, a professor at the Santa Clara University School of Law, told Al Jazeera.

“We’re talking about massive financial stakes, and we’re also talking about the ability of the plaintiffs to veto or potentially override editorial decisions by the services about what’s in the best interests of their audiences,” he said.

“It’s essentially taking away power from the services to decide and handing it to plaintiffs’ lawyers. So, not only could there be existential damages, but there could also be a massive loss of editorial control over their services. The stakes could not be higher for social media services or the internet.”

Goldman said this was because the same argument could be used to shape claims against video game makers and generative AI, which refers to AI that can create original content, including text and video.

“If these theories work against social media, they might also work against video games, against generative AI, and who knows what else. That’s why I said the stakes are so high for the internet,” he added.

There are already lawsuits that claim that interactions with OpenAI’s ChatGPT led to instances of suicide and murder-suicide.

On Wall Street, Meta stock is trending up by more than 3 percent in midday trading.

The long-awaited re-opening of Gaza’s Rafah crossing has been deemed too late for many seeking treatments, in life-or-death conditions. Al Jazeera’s Hind Khoudary spoke to a mother who had lost her sick child while waiting for the crossing to open.

Liam Conejo Ramos and his father, Adrian, were accompanied home by Texas Democratic Representative Joaquin Castro.

A five-year-old boy and his father, who were detained as part of United States President Donald Trump’s aggressive immigration raids and held at a detention facility in Texas, have returned to their home in Minnesota.

Liam Conejo Ramos and his father, Adrian, who are asylum seekers from Ecuador, spent 10 days in the Dilley detention centre until US District Judge Fred Biery ordered their release on Saturday.

US Representative Joaquin Castro, a Texas Democrat, wrote in a social media post that he picked them up on Saturday night at the detention facility and escorted them home on Sunday.

“Liam is now home. With his hat and his backpack,” Castro wrote, including photos of the child. “We won’t stop until all children and families are home.”

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents arrested Liam and his father on January 20 as the boy arrived home from preschool.

Images of the boy with a blue bunny hat and backpack being held by officers spread around the world and added fire to public outrage at the federal immigration crackdown, during which agents have shot dead two US citizens.

Liam was one of four students detained by immigration officials in a Minneapolis suburb, according to the Columbia Heights Public School District.

In a statement, Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin said ICE did not target or arrest Liam, and that his mother refused to take him after his father’s apprehension. His father told officers he wanted Liam to be with him, she said.

“The Trump administration is committed to restoring the rule of law and common sense to our immigration system, and will continue to fight for the arrest, detention, and removal of aliens who have no right to be in this country,” McLaughlin said.

Neighbours and school officials say that federal immigration officers used the preschooler as “bait” by telling him to knock on the door to his house so that his mother would answer.

DHS called the description of events an “abject lie”. It said the father fled on foot and left the boy in a running vehicle in their driveway.

Biery said in a scathing opinion that “the case has its genesis in the ill-conceived and incompetently-implemented government pursuit of daily deportation quotas, apparently even if it requires traumatizing children”.

He criticised what he called the government’s apparent “ignorance” of the US Declaration of Independence, which “enumerated grievances against a would-be authoritarian king over our nascent nation”.

Biery also cited the Fourth Amendment of the US Constitution, which protects the right against “unreasonable searches and seizures”.

US Representative Ilhan Omar, a Democrat from Minnesota, posted a photo to social media of her with Liam, his father and Castro, with her holding Liam’s Spider-Man backpack.

“Welcome home Liam,” she posted with two hearts.